With hundreds of millions to their names, Iowa Powerball winners leap into demanding jobs

Brian Lohse won the lottery in 2012 and this year decided to go back to work and run for the Iowa Legislature.
Kelsey Kremer, kkremer@dmreg.com

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Brian Lohse of Bondurant sits in a corner booth of the cafe at Brick Street Market on Monday, Nov. 12, 2018, in Bondurant. Lohse and his wife opened the grocery store after winning the $202 million Powerball jackpot in 2012.(Photo: Kelsey Kremer/The Register)Buy Photo

Once fiercely private, lottery winners are launching foundations and running for public office. On the same day as Lohse’s win, lottery winner Gil Cisneros was battling for a seat in California’s 39th Congressional District. (Cisneros was declared the winner of the narrow race Nov. 17.)

Lottery winners have always talked about using their new windfall or unburdened time for the common good, and many have done so, said Iowa Lottery spokeswoman Mary Neubauer. But launching public efforts is more common today, “whereas years ago discussion of money issues was just not done.”

West, who raised three daughters as a single mother, decided to set up a foundation named after her grandson Callum, who was born prematurely and lived just one day. The foundation will supply grants to help alleviate poverty and hunger and encourage education, animal welfare and veterans’ affairs. Her father is a Vietnam veteran and three of her brothers have served in the military.

She announced her first donation of $500,000 to the Travis Mills Foundation, which supports veterans and their families overcome obstacles.

"It's very important to me that we never forget the sacrifices these soldiers and their families make for their country," she said.

Of course, giving has advantages for the giver.

“Nobody wants to give more money to the IRS that they need to, so a foundation is an excellent way to avoid that,” said Phil Gose, a wealth management consultant in West Des Moines who has advised former lottery winners and professional athletes.

He said a private foundation is a “tax reduction strategy” that can mean a 30 percent to 50 percent deduction in federal taxes on adjusted gross income and as much as 45 percent on state estate taxes.

Some past lottery winners from Iowa have chosen to give to supporting organizations or community foundations instead of setting up their own.

Tim and Kellie Guderian of Fort Dodge donated part of their 2006 Powerball jackpot to the Fort Dodge Community Foundation. Kelly Mulford, part of the Cedar Rapids group that claimed a 2012 Powerball jackpot, made a large donation to the United Way of East Central Iowa Endowment Fund.

Setting up your own foundation means hiring a staff of experts to run it, and that costs money.

“It’s like operating a business, a business of giving away money,” Gose said.

Mary and Brian Lohse launched the Lohse Family Foundation and have been among the most public winners in the lottery's history. They paid off the mortgage of their church, gave money to help build a football stadium for the local school, and built a $4.5 million grocery store, Brick Street Market & Café, because they said the community needed one.

Brian Lohse of Bondurant and his family pose for a photo. On Nov. 6, Brian Lohse was elected to Iowa House District 30.(Photo: Jeff Roberts/Special to the Register)

He believes large organizations such as the government are not as effective at helping people as small ones like churches or his foundation, “where we can decide who deserves it.”

Now, he’s working for the government.

It never made his list of dreams of what he’d do after winning the lottery. Not working again was high on the list.

“The last thing I ever thought I would do is be in the Legislature,” he said.

He could sit at the Minnesota cabin near Waterville that the couple bought with their winnings and do some ice fishing, or spend long, contentious winter days wrangling over health care policy. He made the choice for the latter, he said, after Republican Zach Nunn decided to vacate the seat and run for the Iowa Senate.

Lohse said he’s been a fiscal and social conservative all his life and wanted the seat to stay Republican. He decided he was the best one to do it in the 2½ months from Nunn’s decision to the election. He was known in the district as a Bondurant city council member and had the money, lending his campaign $50,000.

Lohse received 56 percent of the vote to defeat Altoona Democrat Kent Balduchi.

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A winning Powerball ticket worth a gross of $202.1 million was claimed by an Iowa couple, Mary and Brian Lohse in the fall of 2012. Mary works at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. Brian works at EMC Insurance. The couple lives in Bondurant. Rodney White/The Register

As the frenzy over a $425 million Powerball reaches fever pitch before Wednesday night's drawing, we talk to the last big Powerball winners -- Brian and Mary Loshe of Bounderant. Rodney White/The Register

Lottery winners Brian and Mary Lohse are busy preparing to open Brick Street Market and Cafe in their home town of Bondurant. Mary Lohse tries out a motorized shopping cart that just arrived at the store Wednesday, March 12, 2014. Mary Willie/The Register

Lottery winners Brian and Mary Lohse are busy preparing to open Brick Street Market and Cafe in their home town of Bondurant Wednesday, March 12, 2014. Brian samples ham left by a food vendor on what will be the cafe counter. Mary Willie/The Register

Lottery winners Brian and Mary Lohse are busy preparing to open Brick Street Market and Cafe in their home town of Bondurant Wednesday, March 12, 2014. Brian samples ham left by a food vendor on what will be the cafe counter. Mary Willie/The Register

A winning Powerball ticket worth a gross of $202.1 million was claimed by an Iowa couple, Mary and Brian Lohse in the fall of 2012. Mary works at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. Brian works at EMC Insurance. The couple lives in Bondurant. Rodney White/The Register

A winning Powerball ticket worth a gross of $202.1 million was claimed by an Iowa couple, Mary and Brian Lohse in the fall of 2012. Mary works at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines. Brian works at EMC Insurance. The couple lives in Bondurant. Rodney White/The Register

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Lohse’s wealth only came up a couple times during the campaign, he said, and that was on social media. Balduchi, “to his credit, shot down those comments.”

Longtime Statehouse staffers say they don’t keep records of prior lottery winners that have held office but are certain Lohse is the first, at least with significant winnings.

At least one other winner has held a political office — Iowa’s first Powerball winner, Ed Brown of Washington, Iowa.

After winning $5.2 million in a Dec. 23, 1992, drawing at age 39, he quit his maintenance job and became mayor of Washington from 1998 to 2006.

“It was a nice way to give back,” Brown said. “I have lived here all my life, and I wanted to do a little something for the community.”

Six months after he took office, a tornado damaged numerous structures in the community, followed by a wind storm that caused more damage a short time later.

His was no easy job, yet he donated his $6,200 salary to the community center. At age 65, Brown looks back with pride that he helped the small eastern Iowa city by pushing for a paid city administrator to run the business of the town.

His riches, relatively small compared to today’s winners, never came up.

“Nobody ever held it against me,” he said.

Lohse, 49 and father of three, will make a paltry $25,000 in his role as state representative.

“No one wants that job for the money,” Lohse said, sitting a booth in his market cafe. “If they do, we should be worried.”

October 2006: Fort Dodge's Timothy Guderian won a Powerball jackpot prize worth $200.8 million.
Here, Iowa Lottery's Edward Stanek, left, poses with Timothy and his wife, Kellie, after they claimed the prize. "We played the lottery about twice a month, but never expected to win," Timothy said. Rodney White/The Register

January 2006: Des Moines' Hugh Hawkins won a Powerball jackpot prize worth $113.2 million. "We are very, very fortunate," said Hawkins, who appeared at a news conference with his wife, Cindy, their 3-year-old daughter Katie and 6-year-old son Alex. Hawkins said he had been on a business trip the week of the drawing and learned only days later that it was a winner. He had stopped at the Dahl's supermarket where he purchased it and heard people talking about a winner. He pulled the ticket from his pocket and asked the clerk to check it. "Well, it was a match, and I haven't slept in two weeks," Hawkins said. Register file photo

January 2006: Des Moines' Hugh Hawkins won a Powerball jackpot prize worth $113.2 million. Hawkins said he did not let the computer select the numbers. For example, he used his own birthday and that of his wife. Register file photo

January 2006: Des Moines' Hugh Hawkins won a Powerball jackpot prize worth $113.2 million. Hawkins shakes hands with Dixie Upenieks, a Dahl's clerk at the Beaverdale store who helped validate Hawkins' winning lottery ticket when he came in to check his numbers and discovered he had won the $113.2 million Powerball jackpot, at the time the largest lottery prize won in Iowa. Register file photo

January 2000: Sabula's Haskin family won a Powerball jackpot prize worth $31.8 million. Sarann Haskin, left, and her husband Larry, are framed in a license-plate frame they were given — along with a huge Powerball check — at Iowa Lottery headquarters in Des Moines. At the rear are their children, left to right, James, Michelle and Michael, and Larry's mother, Violet Haskin. Register file photo

March 1999: Des Moines' Timothy Schultz, right, won a Powerball jackpot prize worth $28 million. At left is his father, Steve. Timothy, a Hoover High grad, was a college student working part-time at a Coastal Mart when he bought the ticket. Register file photo

November 2004: Jacquelyn Moore of Omaha, Nebraska, won a Powerball jackpot prize worth $14.4 million from a lottery ticket purchased in Iowa. Moore, a cereal mill worker from Omaha and mother of three, said she wasn't going to quit working after buying the winning ticket in Iowa. "(The money) will just make things easier," she said, "but I'm not going to go crazy." Register file photo

He ran for office because it was important to impart “conservative voice and values” with a dose of bipartisanship on issues important to him, such as alleviating labor shortages and improving access to mental health care.

“I’ve never been hellfire and brimstone,” he said.

Among those conservative ideas is supply-side economics, which the millionaire who “grew up in Reagan country in Dixon, Illinois,” supports.

Money from healthy employers and wealthy folks not burdened by heavy taxes doesn’t just “trickle down,” to those with less money, he said. In Bondurant, it created a “waterfall.”

He cites his employees at the market earning wages from his windfall, and then his own business — supported by even richer folks who built the Facebook data center, whose employees often come in for food.

Many economists have long argued that supply-side economics doesn’t work, pointing to widening income gaps, even as the taxes at the top have decreased over decades.

That’s an argument for his new job as a very loaded state legislator, one of the recent civic-minded lottery winners.

“I would hope I’m the same person I always was,” he said, “minus the full-time job.”